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The destruction of Timbuctu: a war crime

the first verdict of the International Criminal Court

For the first time, the International Criminal Court has issued a verdict on the crime of disruption of the cultural heritage. Ahmad al-Mahdi, member of a Jihadist group tied to Al Qaed in Mali, was in facts sentenced to 9 years in jail for destroying the sanctuaries of Timbuctu during the conflict begun in 2012.

The great treasure of the city consists of the dozens thousands manuscript dating back to the period between the Twelfth and the Sixteenth century, which were rescued almost wholly from the jihadist fury thanks to the courage of librarian Adbel Kader Haiara. Despute Haiara's efforts - he even employed the funds of his study grant to pay for the transfer if the manuscripts to the capital of Mali, Bamako -, in January 2013 the Al Qaeda militiamen set afire the Ahmed Baba Institute of Timbuctu, which kept almost 100,000 manuscripts. After destroying the libraries, the jihadists turned to the monuments.

This is how, in his capacity as chief of the morals police, Ahmad al Mahdi unleashed the destruction of ten mausoleums, including those of Sidi Mahamoud Ben Omar Mohamed Aquit, Sheik Mohamed Mahmoud Al Arawani, Sheik Sidi Mokhtar Ben Sidi Muhammad Ben Sheik Alkabir and the door of the Sidi Yahia mosque - today, fortunately rebuilt thanks to the commitment of the Unesco and foreign funds.
The penalty set for such crimes amounted to up to 30 years, but the judge even reduced the 11 years the prosecutor had demanded, for he had found several extenuating circumstances. First of all, the defendant pleaded guilty, and expressed remorse for his deeds. "I ask the people of Timbuctu for forgiveness and to be judge as a son who has lost his route", Al Mahdi had said on past 22 August, during his first appearance in the room. In addition, the judge reminded that in several different situations the man showed reluctance at carrying out the destruction, often getting the bulldozers to stop before the destruction of the sanctuaries was completed.

The case of Al Mahdi was the first of this kind for the International Criminal Court, but the Court for the former Yugoslavia had already issued verdicts for "cultural disruption" concerning the shelling of the Croatian town of Dubrovnik and the Mostar bridge in Bosnia. In any case, this verdict has again brought into the spotlight what has become a key topic for the public opinion, above all after the destruction of the Buddha of Bamiyan in Afghanistan, the towns of Ninive and Nimrud in Iraq and the archeaological site of Palmyra in Syria. The attention of the International Criminal Court toward this topic reflects the open discussion regarding the need for the tribunals, side by side with the crimes against the people, to judge also over the crimes against the cultural heritage, especially when the destruction of monuments also targets and envisages to erase the identity and history of a people or a civilization.

There is no lack at criticism of this vision, highlighting the fear that broadening the category of war crimes could some how diminish the crimes of torture, murder and genocide.
Such issues had already emerged after the murder, on 18 August 2015 of Palmyra's "keeper", slaughtered by the terrorists over refusing to reveal the whereabouts of the treasures of his town, whom Gariwo honoured with a tree and a stone in the Gardens of Milan and Tunis.

Is the destruction of monuments thus as shocking as the beheading of a human being? So answered the reporter of the Guardian, Julian Baggini: “If I had to choose, I am sure I would rescue a person before a Picasso, from the fire of a house. But this does not mean that caring about the heritage means to care of things more than of people. Rather, it is a way to care about the people as more than mere biological entities”.

Such stance, one year later, was further stressed by journalist Gwynne Dyer who, in  Internazionale, affirmed: “Today's jihadist vandals belong to a long tradition, and none of their predecessors has been punished. Can we thus say the ICC today is simply hounding against Muslims?  No, it is not. The crime of genocide was only introduced in 1945 and 1946 at the trials in Nuremberg, although history has plenty of genocide cases. But the world was not hounding against the Germans. We had simply reached a point in our history in which we could eventually agree on the fact that genocide, always and everywhere, is a crime against the humanity.
Criminalizing the act of willingly destroying the cultural heritage is nothing but another step, for how lesser, in the same pathway toward the construction of an international legal corpus on human rights, which retains value for the whole of us. 

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